Love and Treasure

by Waldman, Ayelet

  “I don’t get upset,” he said.

  Natalie’s attempt to suppress her smile served only to annoy him more than an actual grin would have. “I didn’t mention you or Komlós by name,” she said. “Only that Elek said there was an art dealer interested in my pendant because of a painting. But I suppose he guessed?”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  “Is he looking for Komlós’s painting as well?”

  “Everyone with interest in the field is looking for Komlós’s painting. But again, it is no matter.”

  At this point, he had invested nothing more than a plane ticket and the price of a few nights in the Hotel Gellért in this latest dead end in his search. The best thing he could do was cut his losses and leave. There were other artists, other paintings. There were even other jobs. He indulged for a moment the fantasy of asking his uncle to transfer him to a different branch of the company. Why should he not sell real estate, like his cousins? Or electronics?

  Natalie said, “Well, it obviously is a ‘matter.’ ”

  There were other artists, other jobs, and other girls, too. Lots and lots of other girls.

  She sat down in a chair, tucking her bare legs up beneath the terry robe. She wrapped her hands around a cup of coffee. The robe slipped off her shoulder. Even wet, her wild curls tumbled prettily over her pink skin.

  He said, “Come, shall we go to the Castle Hill? I am not sure when the Széchényi reference libraries close for lunch.”

  • 19 •

  IT TOOK ONLY A few minutes in the Széchényi Library for Amitai and Natalie to discover that the bulk of what they needed was available online, in an archive meticulously translated and uploaded by the reference staff of the New York Public Library.

  “I spent a thousand dollars to fly to Budapest,” Natalie said, exasperated, “and the papers I’m looking for are a mile from my apartment.”

  “I once spent a month in the Czech Republic on the trail of a Degas statue,” Amitai said. “Only to discover that my client’s father had given it to his pregnant mistress when he sent her to America after the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland. I eventually found it in a cardboard box in her daughter’s basement in Hackensack, New Jersey.”

  “Seriously?” Natalie said. “What did you do?”

  “I introduced the half sisters and organized the sale.”

  The huge cache of photographs from the Suffrage Congress that had been archived by the NYPL included pictures of the delegates arrayed on the steps of Parliament, of the mayor of Budapest greeting the attendees, of Boy Scouts who had served as city guides, and, in a photograph captioned “Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer and colleague at Mrs. Megyeri’s villa in Budapest,” of a stout yet elegantly dressed woman in a platter-sized ostrich-feather hat, standing on a set of sweeping white marble steps between two pillars on which cherub archers stood on tiptoe. Standing beside the famous suffragist, looking equally elegant in a pleated tunic over a fitted sheath, was the unnamed colleague, the top of whose plumed toque just reached the underside of Mrs. Schwimmer’s formidable bosom.

  “Holy shit,” Natalie said. “Amitai, oh, my God, it’s her.”

  “Probably.”

  “It is totally her!”

  Her exuberance was at once charming and disconcerting. Amitai was used to carrying out his business in an atmosphere if not of secrecy, then certainly of discretion. He glanced around. They were sitting side by side on a small settee in the Gellért’s lobby with his laptop open on the table in front of them. The waiter caught his eye and winked.

  She snapped open the locket and held it up to the screen of the laptop, looking back and forth at the tiny face emerging from the pixel blur of the scanned photograph to the tiny portrait on a scrap of ancient photo paper, scratched and faded. “I can’t believe we found her!”

  “Madam,” the waiter said, appearing at Natalie’s elbow with a small plate of apricot kiflie.

  “Thank you,” she said, with an effusive grin, her excitement over the photograph spreading to everything and everyone in their vicinity.

  “I don’t know,” Amitai said when the waiter had gone.

  “Okay, first of all, what are you saying, there were two beautiful dwarfs who attended the International Woman Suffrage Congress in 1913?”

  “Perhaps there was an entire dwarf delegation.”

  “It’s definitely her,” Natalie said. “She’s got that same incredible pompadour.”

  “So who is this Schwimmer of whom our lady is the unnamed colleague?”

  A quick search found that Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer had been one of the organizers of the congress. She was the editor of the Hungarian feminist magazine The Woman, the founder of the Hungarian Feminist Association and of the Women’s Peace Party, and Hungarian ambassador to Switzerland. In 1921, she had fled to the United States in response to the Jewish purges in her homeland. It was her papers that had been donated to the New York Public Library to create the archive they were searching.

  “Let me see what I can find out about the women’s magazine,” Natalie said. “Maybe there will be some reference to Schwimmer’s colleague.” She clicked rapidly through a few links. “Damn it! It’s all in Hungarian.”

  “Perhaps I can help?”

  They glanced up to find the waiter hovering.

  “I am not only a waiter but also a student. I have a master’s degree in English literature, and I am applying now to graduate schools in America. I can translate for you.”

  After first making sure no other patrons were waiting for his attention, the waiter sat down with them, took the laptop, and began searching. Very quickly he turned up an article from the February 16, 1913, issue of Schwimmer’s magazine about a lecture at the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, at which a Miss Gizella Weisz, described as “Mrs. Rózsa Schwimmer’s diminutive and talented young secretary,” presented on behalf of her employer a letter praising the Men’s League’s efforts in combating the transport of Hungarian girls to Russia and Turkey for the purposes of sexual slavery.

  “It must be her,” Natalie said. “Otherwise why reference her height at all?”

  “Gizella Weisz,” Amitai said. Could it be that he was finally closing in on the painting that had obsessed him for so long? No, he reminded himself sternly, chances were still that it had simply disappeared along with the rest of the contents of the Gold Train.

  “That’s her,” Natalie said, gazing down at the picture in her locket. “She’s got the most beautiful face.”

  “She is beautiful,” Amitai agreed. “Now who is that equally beautiful woman beside her?”

  At this point Krisztián, their waiter-cum-translator, was forced to abandon them to serve a group of Japanese tourists. They resumed their study of the NYPL photo archive, searching through hundreds of scanned images for the other young woman, the willowy one with the fair hair and the full lower lip. Though they found no photograph that was clearly of her, they did find one of a group of young women holding posters on long poles, each with the name of a different language. They wore light-colored dusters over their white dresses, sashes across their chests, and what appeared to be white sailor caps. The young woman holding the sign that said DEUTSCH must have moved just as the film was exposed, because her face was blurry. Her hair was tucked up under the sailor cap so that its color could not be distinguished, but nonetheless Natalie insisted that she resembled the photograph in the locket.

  “Possible” was the most Amitai was willing to allow. Though he could not help but be affected by Natalie’s enthusiasm, he tried to remain calm. It was never useful in his business to rush to conclusions, to allow optimism and enthusiasm to overwhelm caution and skepticism.

  Unfortunately, the photograph was captioned only “Pages at Cong., 1913,” with no other identifying information, and nowhere in the index of archived documents was there a list of the names of the young women who had acted as congress pages.

  Krisztián returned. “I’m off work,” he said, pulling out a chai
r. “Maybe I can help you more?”

  “You’re being so helpful, Krisztián,” Natalie said. “How can we repay you?”

  Krisztián appeared to consider the question.

  “How about money?” he suggested.

  Amitai swiftly negotiated a fair price for Krisztián’s time. He then directed the young man to search through the online archives of the various Budapest dailies from the period, searching for references to Miss Gizella Weisz.

  They found one article from March 1913 in a magazine called the Magyar Genius, a society column that recorded that Gizella Weisz, a “girl dwarf,” had attended a performance at the Royal Theater of the play The Yellow Lily as the companion of Mrs. Schwimmer.

  Krisztián changed his search to the term “girl dwarf,” and found a second hit in a newspaper called Magyarság, from the issue of August 15, 1913. This was a front-page story, prone to a certain tone of alarm, reporting that on the previous night a gang of foreign ruffians, including a female dwarf, had stampeded the royal box at the Budapest Royal Opera House during a performance of Sándor Szeghő’s one-act opera Erzsébet Báthory. Thankfully, the writer said, the king himself had been absent, though a member of the royal guard was injured during the fracas.

  This was big news at the time, reported in all the papers that Krisztián searched. “According to the right-wing papers,” he said, “shots were fired, a banner demanding universal suffrage was hung from the box, and the conspirators dumped onto the crowd pamphlets calling for the assassination of Franz Josef and the redistribution of wealth. The left-wing papers describe it somewhat differently. They agree about the banner, but they make no reference to gunshots. One reprinted the pamphlet, which says nothing about assassinating the king. It says only that the monarchy should give way to government by the worker.”

  “It must be Gizella,” Natalie said. “What do the articles say about her? What exactly did she do?”

  “You see here?” He pointed to the screen on which was reproduced a page of newsprint. “This paper is, what do you call? A scandal paper? It writes about sexual affairs and divorces. That kind of thing.”

  “A tabloid?” Natalie said.

  “Yes, exactly. The headline is ‘Bolshevik Girl-Dwarf and Conspirators Wreak Havoc on Opera!’ It says she used her sexual perversions to distract the guards.”

  “What kind of ‘sexual perversions’?”

  Krisztián dutifully scrolled through the rest of the article, looking for prurient details with the air of a biologist counting fruit flies.

  “They do not say,” he said at last.

  Amitai said, “I imagine that in 1913 any hint of sexuality at all from a dwarf would have been considered perverse.”

  Krisztián said, “Only this paper talks about perversions. The others say only that she was a conspirator. They do not say sex.”

  Natalie said, “So, what, this ‘sexual perversion’ thing is just the tabloid being dramatic?”

  “Probably.”

  Amitai said, “Let’s figure out what happened to Gizella, if it is her, after she and the others were arrested. They went to prison, I assume? Were they executed?”

  Krisztián continued searching. After a few minutes he said, “Okay, well, I find here information that the others from the conspiracy were sentenced to hard labor after a big trial. Very public, you know? It was even covered in other countries. But I don’t find anything about the girl dwarf. It is like she disappears from the case.”

  Amitai said, “Schwimmer was politically powerful. There was that picture of her with the mayor of Budapest, remember? And she later on became an ambassador. She must have used her clout to get Gizella off.”

  “Also maybe just the judge cannot believe this little girl dwarf is really such a criminal,” Krisztián said.

  “Don’t call her that,” Natalie said. “ ‘Girl dwarf.’ ”

  “Why not?” Amitai said. “You did.”

  “I know, but it’s insulting. We shouldn’t call her a dwarf. She was a ‘little person.’ ”

  “No, I’m quite sure she was a dwarf,” Amitai said. “You can see in her picture, her proportions are not normal.”

  “I know. I mean, yes, she had dwarfism. But I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to call people with dwarfism ‘little people’ now.”

  Amitai said, “You think ‘little person’ is less insulting than ‘dwarf’?”

  “It’s not what I think. It’s what they call themselves.”

  “This particular dwarf has been dead a very long time. I think probably when she was alive she was relieved to be called a dwarf and not something ugly.”

  All the while they were talking, Krisztián kept up his search, stopping only periodically to blow a lock of lanky hair out of his eyes.

  Krisztián said, “Gizella Weisz’s family called themselves ‘Lilliputs.’ I mean, I think they are her family. The articles said the girl …” He paused, then continued. “The little person … girl …”

  Amitai laughed.

  Krisztián flushed but plowed on. “The girl little person was from Transylvania, so, look. I search for dwarfs named Weisz in Transylvania, and here is a whole family of them from Tăşnad.”

  “Transylvania!” Natalie said. “Is Tăşnad near Nagyvárad?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe one hour? Two hours?” Krisztián said. “Transylvania is very large. The Weisz family, they were singers and performers.”

  “Performing dwarfs?” Natalie said.

  “Performing little people,” Amitai said.

  Krisztián said, “They had a family troupe.”

  “Like a circus?” Amitai said.

  “Some places they call them circus, but I think not so much circus as performance, in a theater, you know? Singing, dancing. Comedy.”

  “Vaudeville,” Natalie said. “Gizella’s family were vaudeville performers.”

  Amitai laughed. “So, Natalie, when you decided to find the owner of your necklace, did you ever dream she would be a radical socialist, performing Lilliputian? Or, more accurate, the friend of a radical socialist, performing Lilliputian?”

  Natalie ignored him. “So Gizella was from Romania? She wasn’t Hungarian?”

  Krisztián said, “This part of Transylvania, it goes back and forth. Before World War One, it is Hungary. Afterward it is Romania. Then it is Hungary again; now it is Romania. There are people in Hungary now, you know Jobbik? The fascist political party? They want it back again. Because it is all, you know, the ancient kingdom of Hungary.”

  It seemed to Amitai that Krisztián did not sound entirely averse to the proprietary claims of the party he’d described as fascist.

  One long night, his face plowed into the grit of a Lebanese hillside, his clothing soaked with blood—his own and that of the mangled young men beside him—had cured Amitai of humanity’s fetish for homeland. Whatever reflex or impulse that made a man care enough about such things to vote or demonstrate, to pick up arms and die, had been erased in him as thoroughly as the Jews had been erased from eastern Europe. Now he craved only the anonymity of the immigrant, to be a man with a vague accent in a city of vague accents.

  Natalie said, “But Gizella must have been Hungarian, right? Otherwise wouldn’t the papers have said something about her being Romanian?”

  “Well, it seems she was a Jew,” Krisztián said.

  “But a Hungarian Jew or a Romanian Jew?” Natalie pressed.

  Krisztián said, “Like I say, parts of Transylvania are sometimes Hungarian, sometimes Romanian. But Gizella is always just a Jew, you know?”

  It was the casualness of his tone that caught Amitai and Natalie off guard, the phrase spoken without awareness of its meaning or power. Always just a Jew. Natalie looked away, a flush creeping up her neck, as if she were somehow ashamed, not of Krisztián, Amitai thought, but of herself.

  Gruffly, Amitai said, “The Weisz family probably spoke Hungarian, Romanian, Russian, German, and Yiddish. But I’m sure they considered themselves Hungarian
, like most Transylvanian Jews at the time.” He ignored Krisztián’s doubtful look and instructed him to continue searching the Hungarian newspaper archives. While Krisztián worked, Amitai shifted closer to Natalie and draped an arm casually around her shoulder. She shot him a grateful smile.

  “There were seven Weisz siblings,” Krisztián said, “all of them dwarfs.”

  “That seems almost too perfect,” Natalie said.

  Of those seven dwarfs, five had been girls, Krisztián told them. The two elder Lilliput sisters played the violin, one of the younger ones played a drum set, another a half-sized cello. The brothers performed on tiny accordions, and the youngest girl played a miniature pink guitar.